Is the Italian peninsula perceivable? Today it is, just as much as the moon, nor is there any need to look at it from the moon, when we can photograph it from a satellite. And before we had satellites, was there a CT of the Boot? Of course there was, as every Italian schoolboy knows, just as every French schoolboy had a CT of the Hexagon. Yet in those days nobody had perceived these territories. However, through successive approximations, by mapping the coasts to a scale that was almost one to one, an image was obtained (certainly variable in time and according to the projections or the imperfection of the measurements, as happened with ancient maps) that transmitted the NC of the geographical expressions Italy and France.
Are there CTs of historic figures? For some, who have inspired a massive and highly popular iconography (such as Napoleon), the answer is certainly yes. Is there a CT of Roger Bacon? I doubt it; there is only an NC, not known to everybody either («medieval philosopher») and an MC available for the experts. I think that, beyond a certain limit, some very intricate situations arise. We certainly do not have a CT for some chemical substances, but we have one for others, such as hydrochloric acid, at least as much as we have one for the skunk (see Neubauer and Petofi 1981); but a chemist might have a more developed competence in this regard. We do not have a cognitive type for diabetes (it is a different matter to say that a doctor has a cognitive type for the symptoms of diabetes), but we have the impression that we can identify at a glance a person suffering from a cold, so much so that people with colds can be caricatured or mimed.
Just how little the archipelago of the CTs has been explored is revealed to us by a very common experience.
3.7.6 If on a Winter’s Night a Driver
I am driving at night on a country road, covered with a thin layer of ice to boot. At a certain point I see ahead of me, in the distance, two sources of white light, which gradually get bigger. First there comes Firstness: two white lights. Then, in order to compare a sequence of stimuli distributed temporally (light in time2 greater than light in time1), I must have already begun a perceptual inference. At this point there come into play what Neisser (1976, 4) calls «schemata,» forms of expectation and anticipation that orient the selection of elements from the stimulating field (which does not mean that the stimulating field does not offer me some salient features, some preferential directions). I really do not think I could activate a system of expectations if I did not already possess the CT «motor car» plus the script «motor car at night.»
The fact that I see two white lights and not two red lights tells me that the motor car is not moving away from me but coming toward me. If I were a rabbit, I would remain dazzled without being able to interpret such a singular phenomenon, and I would be run over. In order to control the situation, I must understand instantly that what is coming toward me is not a pair of bright eyes but a body with certain morphological features, even if those are not in my stimulating field. Even though the lights I see are those lights (a concrete token), as soon as I pass on to perceptual judgment, I have already entered the universal: what I can see is a car, and I’m not much interested in the make, or in who is driving it.
This is by way of a reply to Gibson and his fundamentally realistic and nonconstructivist, «ecological,» theory of perception. One might agree with him when he states that
the function of the brain … is not to decode signals, nor to interpret messages nor accept images … The function of the brain is not even to organize sensory input or to process data … The perceptual systems, including the nerve centers at various levels up to the brain, are ways of seeking and extracting information about the environment from the flowing array of ambient energy. (1966: 5)
Let us admit that it is the stimulating field itself that offers me salient features, that it is something which is there that provides me with sufficient information to perceive two bright round sources of light, to distinguish the «borders» that separate them from the surrounding environment. I imagine that the rabbit sees something similar, and that its receptors react preferentially to the source of light rather than the surrounding darkness. But only by calling, as Gibson does, this first phase of the process «perception» are we right in saying that it is determined by salient features proposed by the stimulating field. However, if I wish to keep faith with my terminological premises, perceptual judgment is something far more complex than this. What makes me different from the rabbit is that I pass from those stimuli, for all they are determined by the object, to the perceptual judgment That is a car, applying a CT and then integrating what stimulates me now with what I already knew.
Only when I have formulated the perceptual judgment am I able to proceed to a further series of inferences. First of all, I relate the type to the token; the position of the headlights tells me if the car is keeping to the right side of the road or if it is getting dangerously close to the middle, if it is traveling at high or low speed. According to whether I started off by seeing two barely perceptible light sources in the distance or whether the appearance of the lights was preceded by a diffuse glow, I understand whether there is a bend or a dip in the road coming up. Knowing that the road is icy also persuades me to follow other (learned) rules of prudence. As Neisser (1976: 65) would have put it, in this oscillation I am generalizing the object on the one hand and particularizing the schema on the other.
If this is the way things happen, I do not even need to think, as Kant does, that on the one hand there is the manifold of sensation and on the other the abstract apparatus of the categories waiting to be applied with, as a mediatory element, the schema. The schema would be a device, a system of instructions so flexible as to mediate itself continuously, so to speak, and to enhance and correct itself on the basis of the specific experience I am having, impregnated as it is both with semiosic primitives (an object, a brightness) and categorial elements (a car, a vehicle, a moving object).
As I assess the entire situation, there also come into play what Neisser calls «cognitive maps.» I apply to the situation what I know about the default characteristics of a country road (and an icy one at that), and I also assess the width, for example, of the one on which I am traveling, otherwise I could not establish whether the car down there is keeping to the right side of the road or whether there is a risk of its colliding with me. From the way in which my car reacts to little exploratory dabs on the brake pedal, I estimate whether the road surface would tolerate sudden, heavier braking (and in such a case I do not perceive with my eyes but with my feet and buttocks, interpreting a quantity of stimuli that come to me proprioceptively).
In short, in the course of this experience I put to work diverse CTs; CTs of objects, situations, and specific competences that would seem to belong more to MC; schemata of cause-and-effect relations, as well as inferences of various types and degrees of complexity. What I see is only a part of what I understand, and what I understand includes a system of rules of the road, of acquired habits, of laws, of a learned case history, and so I already know that in the past a failure to respect those rules has led to a fatal accident….
That most of these competences are public is borne out intersubjectively by the fact that, if I am inattentive or sleepy, someone beside me will be able to warn me that a car is coming straight for us, and to advise me to steer more to my side of the road (note that this someone has arrived at the same perceptual judgment as I even though he or she is receiving the stimuli at a different angle).
Perhaps, in the course of this process, I have assessed only epiphenomena. But if I did not take these epiphenomena seriously, I would be a rabbit on death row.
3.7.7 Physiognomic Types by Individuals
But let’s go back to the census of the various CTs that make up our as yet largely unexplored archipelago. A CT can also regard individuals. Jackendoff (1987: 198–99) suggests that, even though we have recourse to the same 3-D model both for the recognition of individuals and of genera, two distinct processes are involved. In the case in which I categorize George as a male human being, I decide that the tokeni is an example of the typek. In the case in which I recognize George as George, I decide that a tokeni; is identical to the tokenj.
